As parents and caregivers, we worry about our children so much that we succumb to this fear. It controls us and turns us into overprotective individuals who too quickly give advice or help our child with homework and life decisions. Because of this fear, we find it difficult to focus and often forget to follow through on things due to us not staying mentally present. Our children feel this unnamed fear and mistake it as if we are not happy with them, so they feel unloved or stupid.
Don't be too helpful. My brother Alex had learning problems. Consequently, he had great difficulty in school, which of course, led to low self-esteem. My father worried about him often, and sometimes that concern turned into negative behavior and judgments. He expected my brother to be like his other children. As an adult, Alex struggled to hold onto jobs and experienced huge bouts of depression, and to self-medicate, he drank. I’m sure it was difficult to see his brothers and sisters succeed seemingly without difficulty. My brothers and I became too busy putting ourselves through school and working, then later raising the young families that we weren't there to help my brother during his most difficult times. I felt guilty for a long, long time, and I swore when I had children, I’d be there for them. The problem was that I was helping them too much.
When Kyle entered kindergarten, he would cry the instant he didn’t understand his homework. Where did he learn that he had to understand something instantaneously? Did he learn it from his father, who expected that of him? Or was it genetics because Alan and I expected ourselves to learn new concepts quickly?
Kyle did okay in kindergarten because there was a lot of moving around. However, his great difficulty was the alphabet because he had learned it phonetically in the Montessori. Now he was expected to learn the letters in a new way and learn them in order. Since there were so many kids in the class that hadn't gone to preschool, there was a lot of repeat information, which he found boring. However, I think it helped him to relearn some of the basics. Besides wiggling a lot and making noises, he did fine that year.
I had issues with learning the alphabet in order, but I chalked it up to moving
around so much because my father was in the Air Force that I had missed learning the entire alphabet and telling time. (Sometimes, we moved in the middle of the semester. I had learned the alphabet in a math class in sixth grade after my teacher learned that I didn't know it in order, and my mother taught me how to tell time. I figured Kyle's difficulties just came from me.
The important lesson is to teach how to be an independent learner.
However, within a few weeks of first grade, Kyle’s teacher called to share that he couldn’t stay still, had great difficulty concentrating, oftentimes made noises, and sometimes out of frustration, would throw himself on the floor and bang his head. I was shocked. What was going on?
After the call, I asked Kyle to come downstairs, and we sat on the couch in the kitchen. "Hey, what's going on? Your teacher said you're having problems concentrating at school." I listed a few of the things she had mentioned. His little face screwed up like a dried piece of fruit, and he broke down crying, telling me he didn’t know what to concentrate on. He heard the foot noises, the teacher’s voices in the nearby rooms, the birds outside, the sounds of paper, etc.
My stomach flipped a couple times as if on a grill, so I shared that was exactly my frustration throughout elementary school and junior high. But I explained that I worked super hard to concentrate just on the teacher's voice, looking at her and cutting out the rest of the noises.
Huge alligator tears ran down his face. He replied through sniffles, "I've tried, mommy. I don't think I can do that." But I encouraged him to work at it. The following day, I called the school and asked the teacher to move him near the front to help him focus, and the teacher also agreed to set him up on a daily progress report. I then started him on a behavior calendar. If he had mostly smiley faces, he could choose a movie to watch on the weekend. I wondered if it was possible Kyle could be A.D.D. I was familiar with some of the symptoms because I had a few students with that issue. (Just a smidgeon of a feeling seeped in that I was also A.D.D..) However, Alan told me I was worrying about nothing. He was just a typical boy.
I swore that I would be there for my son so he didn’t have to struggle like my brother, Alex, or myself. Years later, I still remember Alex being placed in a special class and kids calling him a retard. I was so afraid that would happen to my son. I didn’t want Kyle to feel like he was a failure, so I helped him too much instead of allowing him more time to figure out the issue independently, which would have given him confidence. Yes, sometimes I suggested he work on an easier assignment or offer different ways to look at the problem. But he quickly learned all he had to do was whine, cry, or throw a tantrum and my sensitive heart would feel sorry for him. I’d be by his side, soothing him, helping him. When he would start calling himself dumb, I would rattle off all the things he was good at, but that didn’t seem to help. Alan swore that Kyle had learned to control me, but I was sure a little boy would never do that (Years later, a few of his friends told me that Kyle used to bang his head on the floor so he could be sent out of class when he didn’t want to do something. So I guess I was mistaken that young children weren't smart enough to control their teachers and mother.)
Finally, after repeating kindergarten like me and starting 1st grade for the second time with even more frustration, the teacher suggested I have him tested for learning problems and A.D.D. Kyle was identified with Attention Deficit Disorder and Auditory Processing Disorder, meaning he hears what is said. Still, then he's processing what is said before the speaker gets to the end of the sentence, so he ends up missing part of the information. He also was diagnosed with long-term and short-term memory problems and had difficulty placing things in order. I recognized these problems as my issues, especially when I was a kid.
But alas, what I had done was unconsciously teach Kyle that he wasn’t smart because I was quickly by his side to help, saving him, feeling sorry for him. Of course, I didn’t mean to, but that’s what occurred. As he became older, I was more willing to sit back and help him less, and by 9th grade, he was amazingly independent. Researchers write that because many middle-class and upper-class parents are educated, we sometimes pressure our kids to be 'A' students, but we also help them too much. (We never asked for A or B grades, we asked for Nicole and Kyle to do their best.) We must let children struggle and trust that they’ll figure the assignment out. That doesn’t mean you can’t help. It just means give your child time, or as I had found sometimes, it was helpful if I explained the directions differently. And helping, by the way, does not mean doing the work for them.
Helpful sites for helping your child become an independent learner:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hello, thank you for leaving a comment.